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Locator map of the Greater Pittsburgh metro area in the western part of the of . Red denotes the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area, and yellow denotes the New Castle Micropolitan Statistical Area, which is included in the Pittsburgh-New Castle CSA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sunny Kourkoutis spent six months on unemployment and a couple more working in a job she hated before she found something that suited her restaurant experience.

“When I was on unemployment, I could have easily gotten a job as a server,” said Kourkoutis, 42, of Bridgeville. “But at my age, it’s not something I really saw myself doing.”

In April, Kourkoutis finally found a job she enjoyed. She was hired as reservations manager at Jacksons Restaurant in Cecil and since was promoted to assistant executive manager. In so doing, she joined a hospitality industry that added 8,100 jobs last month and has led growth in the local economy.

Employers in the seven-county Pittsburgh region added 22,300 nonfarm jobs in April, and the unemployment rate declined two-tenths of a percentage point to 5.6 percent, according to preliminary figures released on Wednesday by the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry. The decline occurred as 3,900 more people began looking for work, an expression of confidence in Pittsburgh’s economy.

(AP) Three years ago, the operators of one of the nation’s dirtiest coal-fired power plants warned of “immediate and devastating” consequences from the Obama administration’s push to clean up pollution from coal.

Faced with cutting sulfur dioxide pollution blowing into downwind states by 80 percent in less than a year, lawyers for EME Homer City Generation L.P. sued the Environmental Protection Agency to block the rule, saying it would cause it grave harm and bring a painful spike in electricity bills.

None of those dire predictions came to pass.

Instead, the massive western Pennsylvania power plant is expected in a few years to turn from one of the worst polluters in the country to a model for how coal-fired power plants can slash pollution.

Don’t shed any tears for the sizable towns in Pennsylvania that are going to lose the revenue from traffic tickets written on their roads by state police. They still get to keep a more lucrative freebie, the use of state troopers instead of locally funded officers to handle all their law enforcement.

It’s nothing short of cop welfare — a local expense covered by state taxpayers for towns that, relatively speaking, aren’t even needy.

The loss of the ticket money is due to the enactment of Senate Bill 237, which will take effect Sept. 3 in municipalities with 3,000 or more people that have no local police force. Among the towns that will be affected are Hempfield (population 42,000), Unity (24,000), Derry Township (15,000) and Mt. Pleasant (11,000) in Westmoreland County; White (16,000) in Indiana County; North Union (12,700) in Fayette County and Somerset Township (12,000) in Somerset County.